This weekend is International Women’s Day and to celebrate, we have invited Rita Castro to deliver a guest article for the magazine covering the topics involved.
In Software Development we are encouraged to apply some core principles. A good way of memorising some of them is through a mnemonic: SOLID. These five principles are:
- Single responsibility
- Open-closed
- Liskov substitution
- Interface segregation
- Dependency inversion
Three out of five of these principles can be traced back to Robert C. Martin, also known as Uncle Bob for us developers. Bertrand Meyer was responsible for the open-closed one, and guess what, the only one with the author’s name in it was formulated by a woman: Barbara Liskov.
That was actually a surprise for me (although it shouldn’t have been…) and it refreshed another great mnemonic that I was taught at university during a Stellar Astrophysics lecture: “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me”, whose initials are used to categorise a star based on its spectra - OBAFGKM. The teacher told us that it was a woman who came up with it, but he left out some details…
Once upon a time — somewhere before 1880 — there was a little girl called Annie Jump Cannon who loved astronomy. Instead of following the herd to “be a good wife and mother”, her mother actually encouraged her to study science. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884 from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Two years later she was hired as an assistant to the director of the Harvard College Observatory. She was a member of the Harvard Computers, a group tasked with mapping and classifying every star in the sky, among other chores. Annie was the first of this all-female team that analysed data that the (male) astronomers would produce by operating the fancy telescopes and spectrographic equipment. Annie had sharp eyes and she was able to identify a pattern between stars and their stellar spectra. With just a glance at a star’s spectral signature she was able to fit the star into one of the eight categories she created (O, B, A, F, G, K, and M). In 1901, a catalogue of stars published by the Harvard Observatory featured the work of the Harvard Computers and was the debut of Annie’s star classification system. In 1922 — the same year Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics — the International Astronomical Union made it official. Annie Cannon’s stellar classification would be the classification system to be used when categorising stars. Despite this great recognition of her work, Annie and the other “computers” had to endure opinions such as “you are out of your place” and “your job should be to be a housewife”, on top of receiving lower wages than their male counterparts.
The Harvard Computers isn’t the only team of women that were assembled to do “boring jobs” in science contexts. Back in 1950 real computers started to be used at NASA but funnily enough, male engineers and scientists did not trust the machines and preferred that the calculations were done by hand, by a human. Women were hired to deal with that. Endless notebooks were filled with formulas and graphics that showed how many rockets were needed to get a plane airborne and the trajectories of spacecraft, among others. The first woman hired for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California was Barbara Canright in 1939 but there is a limit to what a single person can compute and as such, more women were hired to help out.
One of these women, Macie Roberts, climbed the ranks and became a supervisor for the team. With great power comes great responsibility and she used it wisely. She empowered other women by hiring them straight out of university to join the JPL. In turn, they followed Macie’s example and those who became supervisors continued to empower their peers to pursue their dreams. Barbara Paulson did the calculations that allowed the USA to launch their first satellite in the Space Race against the Soviet Union. After that, she became pregnant with her first child. In the 1960’s there was a rule at NASA that forced women to quit if they became pregnant. Fortunately Barbara’s supervisor - Helen Ling - had the policy to rehire her peers after giving birth, whenever they were ready to come back to work. Thanks to this maternity leave arrangement, Barbara was able to come back to NASA and to compute trajectories to the Mariner probes that were sent to Venus and Mars.
When the real computers were deemed trustworthy, these women (and the ones who followed) continued to make major contributions to the aerospace industry. Helen Ling continued to program and her future software would perform tasks such as mapping the Earth’s surface, studying Mars from orbit, and scanning the entire night sky at infrared wavelengths. Barbara Paulson went on to work on the Viking program, determining how to reach Mars’ surface. She also did calculations for the two Voyager spacecraft, one of which is now far, far … far from home.
Fun fact: the first computer programmer was also a woman! Her name was Ada Lovelace. She was able to write the pseudocode for an algorithm that calculated a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. It was published in 1843 under the name Note G. The paper was praised by fellow scientists like Michael Faraday.
There are so many women that made incredible contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - look at that, another mnemonic: STEM! - and we can celebrate them all every year on February 11th - the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
Like other international days, it is promoted by the United Nations to educate the public on topics of concern. On this date, the goal is to promote full and equal access and participation in science for women and girls. The statistics collected by the UN show that what Annie Cannon’s unequal pay is still noticeable in 2024:
”women are typically given smaller research grants than their male colleagues and, while they represent 33.3% of all researchers, only 12% of members of national science academies are women.”
But that should really get the attention of the society is this:
“Despite a shortage of skills in most of the technological fields driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution, women still account for only 28% of engineering graduates and 40% of graduates in computer science and informatics.”
and
“In cutting edge fields such as artificial intelligence, only one in five professionals (22%) is a woman.”
How can we get more girls interested in science? How can we help them become women in technology?
What can we - as individuals, as families - do? We can take our kids to activities that promote science. Take them to the planetarium, the science museum and promote activities that trigger their curiosity.
For example, at my kids’ school one of the parents took a prism and some books to class and explained the rainbow, the colours and how it all works. Then they went outside and searched for the rainbow that the prism exposed! “Wow! You can see the rainbow without rain!!!!” - the kids said. His daughter was incredibly proud to see her father sharing his knowledge with the rest of the class.
What can we - as companies - do? We can empower and hire girls that recently graduated in technological areas. When I am interviewing software developers I identified a pattern - female candidates are incredibly afraid of getting the wrong answer during their interview when compared to their male counterparts. Everyone gets nervous in interviews, everyone wants to look good, to prove themselves and their worth. But guess what, we don’t have to get it right at the first try. We don’t have to know it all upfront. What we have to do is to be able to question, expose our thoughts and know that we won’t be judged in the process.
What can we all do? Promote and celebrate our fellow women in tech. Celebrate each others’ achievements, regardless of whether it is a Nobel prize, a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal or being a keynote speaker at a conference.
To my fellow women and girls in STEM: Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science!
Congratulations on your achievements and I look forward to those yet to come.
Like Barbara Liskov once said, “May we do what we love and love what we do”.
Isn’t it a solid piece of advice?